This is the dairy department in Seydisfjorder. Icelandic yogurt is very good.

Zoe has the best phone and, with it, the best camera in the whole family.   Like everybody, she can be seen taking lots of pictures here; but don’t expect to see many of her pictures here in the In The BIg Picture blog.  Just about every one else in this family except the parents keeps all her photos to herself.

So you’re stuck with pedestrian picutres of sometimes pedestrian things that we do here.  Like go grocery shopping in real Icelandic grocery stores.

Jen drove most of the way today. She did a great job. Driving in Iceland sometimes requires nerves-of-steel passing skills.

I take lots of pictures while we’re driving because the scenery is so magnificent here.  Driving pictures are the worst, though.  They never come out like they look in real life.  They don’t on my camera, but I wonder what they would look like on Zoe’s phone.   Even when I get pictures of goats — it’s actually pretty difficult to get a picture of scenery here that doesn’t have a goat in it because goats are omnipresent in Iceland.

Today was a little driving-centric.  We broke things up by making an impromptu stop at a beach by the side of the Ring Road.  It wasn’t even mentioned in our guidebook, but we had a fine time feeling the breeze and sifting through the rocks.

We could not linger too long because we had an afternoon appointment and we wanted to check into our hotel before moving on to the big excitement of the day.  (I know!  More exciting than grocery shopping?  It’s true!  Keep reading.)

So now we get to the point of it.  We had a terrific experience at two glacial lagoons today, but not long after we arrived at the first one, the sun went away.  By the time we got on the Zodiak boat for our glacial lagoon tour, the light had flattened out to en extent that our mid-20teens camera can’t really compensate for.  Zoe took pictures, but is not willing to share for the blog.  Somewhere along the line we made a terrible mistake as parents and now our children have trouble sharing.

At least someone’s getting a good picture of this.

Some of our pictures of the glacial lagoon came out nice.  What you’re seeing is chunks of the Vatnajökull glacier that have calved off and are floating around in two lakes very close to the island’s eastern shore.  This glacier is the largest in sub-Arctic Europe — it covers more land than the state of Rhode Island, according to Vincent, our Zodiak captain.

The lagoons are deceptively deep, and the vast majority of the icebergs are beneath the water.  We are not in danger of sinking from crashing into an iceberg, though they did give us special coats to protect us from the cold water and life vests to keep us afloat.

A nice couple from Spain took this picture of us duriing our Zodiak trip.

There is a slight danger from large waves caused by a new ice berg calving off of the glacier and hitting the water.  We stay more than 200 yards from the glacier to give Vincent time to take evasive action in such an event, though he admits that calving only happens on about five percent of his tours and calving of large ice bergs is even more rare.

Sampling a bit of a 500-year-old iceberg — according to our guide, the purest water anywhere.

He does note that sometimes ice bergs turn over and, theoretically can land right on top of the boat, but he doesn’t seem too concerned about that.

Close-up of the glacier

And anyway, not to dampen the suspense or anything, we survived the ice berg lagoon cruise.  Not only did we survive, we saw two seals on an ice berg.  What do you think about that?

The last stop of the day was at Diamond Beach,  the black sand of which is a striking contrast to the small crystals of ice that wash up when the ice bergs make it out to sea.  The crystals look like diamonds.   Our camera has a nice micro zoom feature and I tried to take some close-up pictures of the ice crystals.  I don’t know if Zoe’s camera can do that.

“Diamonds” at Diamond Beach

This is our second-to-last night in Iceland.  Tomorrow is a bit of a heavy driving day, but it will drop us off in Rekyavik.  We had the pleasure of eating delicious artic char this evening for dinner (it’s like salmon).  Tomorrow we’re going to try one last time to get fish and chips.  Somehow we just keep missing out — mostly because the restaurant or food truck closes down just before we get there.  Maybe we’ll have better luck in the big city.